They
are sleeping in front of the Empire State building, sprawled in front
of the doors of Macy's, and panhandling outside Grand Central.
New
York is in the grip of a homeless epidemic so bad that it has raised
fears of the city slipping back into the disorder of the 1970s and
1980s.
The city's police chief this week said that as many as 4,000
people are now sleeping rough in the city, in a crisis which even the
city's ultra-liberal mayor has finally acknowledged after months of
denials.
Police officers have identified 80 separate homeless
encampments in the city, 20 of which are so entrenched that they have
their own furniture, while its former mayor Rudolph Giuliani has spoken
scathingly of how his successor is failing to keep order.
Jobseekers queue outside a Jobcentre Plus branch at London Bridge. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
For
the first time, benefit claimants are at risk of sanctions if they do
not apply for and accept certain zero-hours jobs under the new universal
credit system, despite fears that such contracts are increasingly tying
workers into insecure and low paid employment.
Last week, the
Office for National Statistics revealed the number of contracts that do
not guarantee minimum hours of work or pay but require workers to be on
standby had reached 1.4 million.
More
than one in 10 employers are using such contracts, which are most
likely to be offered to women, young people and people over 65. The
figure rises to almost half of all employers in the tourism, catering
and food sector.
Currently, people claiming jobseekers' allowance
are not required to apply for zero-hours contract vacancies and they do
not face penalties for turning them down.
However, the change in
policy under universal credit was revealed in a letter from Esther
McVey, an employment minister, to Labour MP Sheila Gilmore, who had
raised the issue of sanctions with her.
The senior Tory confirmed that, under the new system, JobCentre "coaches" would be able to "mandate to zero-hours contracts", although they would have discretion about considering whether a role was suitable.
Separately,
a response to a freedom of information request to the Department for
Work and Pensions (DWP) published on its website reveals: "We expect
claimants to do all they reasonably can to look for and move into paid
work. If a claimant turns down a particular vacancy (including
zero-hours contract jobs) a sanction may be applied, but we will look
into the circumstances of the case and consider whether they had a good
reason."
Higher level sanctions – imposed if a jobseeker refuses
to take a position without good reason or leaves a position voluntarily –
will lead to a loss of benefits for 13 weeks on the first occasion, 26
weeks on the second occasion and 156 weeks on the third occasion.
Asked
about the issue by the Guardian, the DWP said jobseekers would not be
required to take a zero-hours contract that tied them in exclusively to
work for a single employer. The government is already consulting on
whether to ban this type of contract altogether.
The change has
been made possible because universal credit will automatically adjust
the level of benefits someone receives depending on the number of hours
they work. This means claimants should not face periods without the
correct benefits when their earnings fluctuate or they change job.
However,
critics raised concerns that the new policy will force people into
uncertain employment and restrict the ability of claimants to seek
better work while still placing a burden on many to increase their
hours.
Labour's Sheila Gilmore said she was concerned about the
situation because JobCentre decision makers already do not appear to be
exercising enough discretion before applying sanctions under the old
regime.
"While I don't object to the principle of either universal
credit or zero-hours contracts, I am concerned about this policy
change," she said. "I also fear that if people are required to take jobs
with zero-hours contracts, they could be prevented from taking training
courses or applying for other jobs that might lead to more stable and
sustainable employment in the long term."
There
are nearly 90,000 homeless people live in Los Angeles County but only
9,000 to 10,000 beds available in homeless shelters, single-room
occupancy hotels, and other facilities. Photograph: David McNew / Getty
Images
Across
the United States, many local governments are responding to
skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of
homelessness among the very poor ... by passing laws making it a crime
to sleep in a parked car.
This happened most recently in Palo Alto,
in California's Silicon Valley, where new billionaires are seemingly
minted every month – and where 92% of homeless people lack shelter of
any kind. Dozens of cities have passed similar anti-homeless laws. The
largest of them is Los Angeles, the longtime unofficial "homeless
capital of America", where lawyers are currently defending a similar
vehicle-sleeping law before a skeptical federal appellate court.
Laws against sleeping on sidewalks or in cars are called "quality of
life" laws. But they certainly don't protect the quality of life of the
poor.
To be sure, people living in cars cannot be the best
neighbors. Some people are able to acquire old and ugly – but still
functioning – recreational vehicles with bathrooms; others do the best
they can. These same cities have resisted efforts to provide more public
toilet facilities, often on the grounds that this will make their city a
"magnet" for homeless people from other cities. As a result,
anti-homeless ordinances often spread to adjacent cities, leaving entire
regions without public facilities of any kind.
Their hope, of
course, is that homeless people will go elsewhere, despite the fact that
the great majority of homeless people are trying to survive in the same
communities in which they were last housed – and where they still
maintain connections. Americans sleeping in their own cars literally
have nowhere to go.
Indeed, nearly all homelessness in the US
begins with a loss of income and an eviction for nonpayment of rent – a
rent set entirely by market forces. The waiting lists are years long for
the tiny fraction of housing with government subsidies. And rents have risen dramatically
in the past two years, in part because long-time tenants must now
compete with the millions of former homeowners who lost their homes in
the Great Recession.
The paths from eviction to homelessness
follow familiar patterns. For the completely destitute without family or
friends able to help, that path leads more or less directly to the
streets. For those slightly better off, unemployment and the exhaustion
of meager savings – along with the good graces of family and friends –
eventually leaves people with only two alternatives: a shelter cot or
their old automobile.
Refugees queue for food parcels in Yarmouk. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
It is a vision of unimaginable
desolation: a crowd of men, women and children stretching as far as the
eye can see into the war-devastated landscape of Yarmouk refugee camp in
Damascus.
A photograph released on Wednesday by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees,
UNRWA, shows the scene when thousands of desperate Palestinians trapped
inside the camp on the edge of the Syrian capital emerged to besiege aid workers attempting to distribute food parcels.
More
than 18,000 people are existing under blockade inside Yarmouk, enduring
acute shortages of food, medicines and other essentials. Much of the
camp has been destroyed by shelling, and attempts to deliver aid to
those inside have been hampered by continued fighting in Syria's three-year-old civil war. United Nations
workers have delivered about 7,000 food parcels over recent weeks,
following negotiations between the Syrian government, rebel forces and
Palestinian factions within the camp. The most recent delivery, of 450
parcels, was on Wednesday. The UN acknowledges that the level of aid is a
"drop in the ocean".
Yarmouk has been cut off since last July.
Many residents are now weak and severely malnourished, as well as being
exposed to the risk of disease, or death and injury from fighting.
Filippo
Grandi, the head of UNRWA, described the camp as a ghost town after
visiting this week. "The devastation is unbelievable. There is not one
single building that I have seen that is not an empty shell by now.
They're all blackened by smoke," he told reporters.
He said he was
even more shocked by the camp's residents, who flooded towards aid
distribution points. "It's like the appearance of ghosts. These are
people who have not been out of there, that have been trapped in there
not only without food, medicines, clean water – all the basics – but
also probably completely subjected to fear because there was fierce
fighting … They can hardly speak. I tried to speak to many of them, and
they all tell the same stories of complete deprivation."
UN chief ‘deeply disturbed’ by refugee camp in Syria
Thursday, February 27, 2014
The
chief of the UN relief agency supporting Palestinian refugees said he
is “deeply disturbed and shaken” by the despair and destruction he had
seen in a besieged camp in the Syrian capital.
By Albert Aji, Syria
The
Yarmouk refugee camp, located in southern Damascus, is an opposition
enclave under the tight blockade of forces loyal to President Bashar
Assad.
More than 100 people have died in Yarmouk since
mid-2013 as a result of starvation and illnesses exacerbated by hunger
or lack of medical aid, according to UN figures.
Filippo
Grandi, commissioner general of UNRWA, was visiting Yarmouk as the
relief agency resumed food distribution there. Shipments to the camp
have been disrupted for months, sometimes cut off for weeks at a time,
and Yarmouk has suffered from crippling shortages of food and medicine.
“I am deeply disturbed and shaken by what I observed,” Grandi said.
Palestinian refugees to whom he spoke in Yarmouk were “traumatised by
what they have lived through.”
The extent of damage to the
refugees’ homes was shocking, he also said, adding that many
Palestinians in Yarmouk need immediate support, particularly food and
medical treatment.
Yarmouk is the largest of nine Palestinian
camps in Syria. Since the camp’s creation in 1957, it has evolved into a
densely populated residential district just five miles from the centre
of Damascus. Several generations of Palestinian refugees have lived
there.
More than 100 people have died in Yarmouk since mid-2013, some of starvation
ap
Published: 16:25 February 25, 2014
Damascus: The chief of the United
Nations relief agency supporting Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday he
is “deeply disturbed and shaken” by the despair and destruction he’d
seen in a besieged camp in the Syrian capital.
The Yarmouk refugee camp,
located in southern Damascus, is an opposition enclave under the tight
blockade of forces loyal to President Bashar Al Assad. More than 100
people have died in Yarmouk since mid-2013 as a result of starvation and
illnesses exacerbated by hunger or lack of medical aid, according to UN
figures.
Filippo Grandi, the
Commissioner General of UNRWA, was visiting Yarmouk as the relief agency
resumed food distribution there. UNRWA shipments to the camp have been
disrupted for months, sometimes cut off for weeks at a time, and Yarmouk
has suffered from crippling shortages of food and medicine.
“I am deeply disturbed and
shaken by what I observed,” Grandi said in a statement. Palestinian
refugees to whom he spoke in Yarmouk Monday were “traumatized by what
they have lived through.”
10 Stories From The Cold, Hard Streets Of America That Will Break Your Heart
By Michael Snyder, on February 23rd, 2014
If
the economy is really "getting better", then why have millions upon
millions of formerly middle class Americans been pushed to the point of
utter despair?
The stories that you are about to read are absolutely
heartbreaking. I don't know how anyone can read them without getting
chills. In America today, if you lose a good job, there is a good
chance that you will get back on your feet before too long. But there
is also a good chance that you won't be able to find a decent job and
will plunge into the abyss of depression and desperation that so many
millions of other Americans have fallen into. As I wrote about earlier this month,
the U.S. economy is definitely not getting any better. For example, if
you assume that the percentage of Americans that want to work is about
at the long term average, then the official unemployment rate in the
United States would be above 11 percent. And compared to six years ago, 1,154,000 fewer Americans
are working today even though our population has gotten significantly
larger since then. Behind all of these numbers are real flesh and blood
people, and you are about to hear from some of them. The following are
10 stories from the cold, hard streets of America that will break your
heart... #1 A 34-year-old man named Rocco...
"While my wife goes to work, I’ve been staying at home to
conserve fuel. I’ve been losing weight from eating less, so my family
has more on their plates. It feels like the government and big business
expect more and more while trying to give back as little as possible.
Soon my internet connection will be shut off and since most companies
don’t offer paper applications, how will I find work then? Walking
around for miles a day, asking for an application that may or may not be
available?"
#2 Homeless people wasting away in "Obamavilles" on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland...
A sheet of plastic laid over a clothesline. A
mini-fortress of milk crates stacked under a tree. A thin mattress on a
flimsy crate lying in a dark tunnel.
On the edge of Baltimore's woodlands, dozens of the city's transients
live in makeshift homes which they consider safer than homeless
shelters.
You can see some incredible photos of how these homeless people are living right here. #3 A 50-year-old woman in Pennsylvania named Karen...
"My husband only makes 10 dollars an hour and drives 30
miles round trip, so it’s taking all we have just to keep the Jeep
filled with gas. We stopped going to church and all to save gas. We are
homebodies now, afraid to use what gas we have. We save two kids from
getting put in foster care just to be hit like this. It’s just a
constant trap they try to keep you from receiving any help! I’m so
disgusted when my 12-year-old asks me why we don’t have snacks anymore,
or why are we eating so much rice, etc."
#4 The following is an excerpt from a comment that was recently left by one of my readers...
"I live right at ground zero. South West Virginia and let
me tell you things are bad and getting worse by the day. We don't do
drugs but have family members hooked on meth and or pills or both. Many
of these pills are prescribed by local doctors either Suboxone to get
you off the opiates, a total joke by the way and tons of Xanax why would
anyone need 120 Xanax a month how can you even be expected to function.
These pills get traded for cash sex and other items, same goes for the
SNAP cards. We have family members going to jail repeatedly for the same
crimes making meth, selling pills and stealing anything that's not
nailed down. People who are 30 years old look like they are 55 years
old. The jobs here are awful walmat, gas stations, fast food etc. Most
of our whole county is on the government dole."
#5 A 55-year-old man from California named Randy Carpadus...
"I was working as a firefighter for the state of
California and was laid off in April 2012, right at the beginning of
fire season. At my age, I'm not going to be picked up by another fire
department. They want younger guys.
I've applied for everything from truck driver, to sales, to nonprofit
work. I've sent out almost 400 resumes, and I've gotten nothing. I've
done whatever I could to make ends meet.
Through some connections, I got a temp job as a truck driver in Napa
Valley -- a 3-hour commute from where I live. I lived in my car and
worked during grape harvest."
#6 In this tough economic environment, debt
collectors are becoming even more aggressive. Just check out the kind
of harassment that one woman named Jennifer Posey has been put through...
"This is Jimmy Lee calling from CheckCare. Just letting
you know we're in full force," he said. The man had a thick Southern
accent that stretched the word "you" into a two-syllable accusation.
"We're going to have warrants out for your arrest in Columbus, Ga.," the
man threatened. "We know you have an apartment on the canal in
Clearwater."
It was when he mentioned her home in Florida that Posey began to feel
anxious. "We're hurting you," he continued. "We're hurting your family,
your son's family, your cousin's family. Whatever we can do to get you
to pay."
Forty minutes later, her phone rang again. "What about that 12-, 13-year-old child you're trying to raise?" the voice sneered.
As the White House proclaims a recovery is occurring,
and the stock market has a head of steam, millions of Americans and
their dependents are being left out of the recovery, according to a set
of economic indicators.
Perhaps the most worrying yet least reported aspect of the
so-called US recovery involves the national labor picture.
Although the official US unemployment rate is 6.7 percent, this
figure obscures the reality, according to an influential Wall
Street adviser.
In a leaked memo to clients, David John Marotta calculates the
actual unemployment rate of Americans out of work at an
astronomic 37.2 percent, as opposed to the 6.7 percent claimed by
the Federal Reserve.
“The unemployment rate only describes people who are
currently working or looking for work,” he said.
“Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion
of people who do not have any job, is 37.2 percent. This number
obviously includes some people who are not or never plan to seek
employment. But it does describe how many people are not able to,
do not want to or cannot find a way to work,” he and
colleague Megan Russell reveal in their client report, which was
leaked to the Washington Examiner.
Contrary to expectations, a drop in the unemployment rate,
Marotta argues, is presently a sign that the unemployed are
simply dropping out of the job market.
The “officially-reported unemployment numbers decrease when
enough time passes to discourage the unemployed from looking for
work,” said Marotta andRussel. “A decrease is not
necessarily beneficial; an increase is clearly detrimental.”
The authors then take aim at the so-called Misery Index, which
provides something of a pulse rate of American prosperity, based
on unemployment and inflation. The Wall Street adviser said the
Index, which he maintains is actually over 14, as opposed to the
8 advertised by Washington, fails to address how the US economy
is being hugely subsidized by various schemes, including monthly
bond
purchases by the Federal Reserve.
“Today, the Misery Index would be 7.54 using official
numbers,” the two analysts wrote. However, taking into
consideration the full unemployment picture, including workers
who have given up the job search, which is 10.2 percent, together
with the historical method of calculating inflation, which is now
4.5 percent, ‘the current misery index is closer to 14.7.”
Don't believe the happy talk coming out of the White House, Federal Reserve and Treasury Department when it comes to the real unemployment rate and the true “Misery Index.” Because, according to an influential Wall Street advisor, the figures are a fraud.
In a memo
to clients provided to Secrets, David John Marotta calculates the
actual unemployment rate of those not working at a sky-high 37.2
percent, not the 6.7 percent advertised by the Fed, and the Misery Index
at over 14, not the 8 claimed by the government.
Marotta, who recently advised those worried about an imploding economy to get a gun,
said that the government isn't being honest in how it calculates those
out of the workforce or inflation, the two numbers used to get the
Misery Index figure.
“The unemployment rate only describes people who are currently
working or looking for work,” he said. That leaves out a ton more.
“Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion of people
who do not have any job, is 37.2 percent. This number obviously
includes some people who are not or never plan to seek employment.
As
Congress wrangles with whether to restore long-term unemployment
benefits, North Carolina is already experiencing the hardship likely to
unfold unless the program is restored
Theresa Whidbee-Walker first found the Food
Bank of the Albemarle as a customer and returns now to volunteer.
Photograph: James Robinson
Eight hours may seem a long time to wait for a meal. But the line of
cars that formed in a derelict parking lot in Hertford, North Carolina,
early last Thursday morning, full of people waiting for a few cans of
soup and some pasta from a local food bank, was nothing unusual. Almost
every morning now, there is a line like that somewhere in North
Carolina.
From a distance, the rows of cars look innocuous enough. But they are
a symbol of the desperation that has gotten worse in North Carolina
since July, when a swathe of cuts to unemployment benefits made it
arguably the worst state in the US to be out of work.
The cars appeared in Hertford shortly before 8am, though the truck
bringing the food was not scheduled to arrive until 4pm. Volunteers who
hand out the food said it is not uncommon for cars to start lining up
before dawn.
“I had a man the other day who said: ‘All I want is a bar of soap,’”
said Laura Williams, a volunteer at the storage depot in nearby
Elizabeth City. “Another man came in here and said: ‘Can you get me some
toilet paper? I’ve been having to use coffee filters.’”
She added: “We get that a lot – people asking for toilet paper. But
we can’t stock too much of that as we’ve got to concentrate on canned
food.”
Washington has this month been dominated by a political fight over
whether to restore a federal benefits program for the long-term
unemployed, which was allowed to expire on 28 December, cutting off a
lifeline to more than 1.4 million Americans. The White House and
Democrats want to reinstate the benefits. Republicans are reluctant.
What North Carolina is currently experiencing is a foretaste of the
economic story likely to unfold across the country unless the federal
benefits are restored.
The people in line on Thursday constituted a cross-section of
America’s poor. Of those who wound down their windows and agreed to
talk, the eldest was 77, the youngest 19. They included pensioners,
students, people working for minimum wage and some who had recently been
laid off. They were there so early, and willing to wait so long,
because they wanted to increase their chances of receiving perishable
items rather than just canned goods. Get a spot near the front of the
line, and you might get some fresh vegetables, bread, or even some
frozen chicken.
Charles Christman has been volunteering at
the Food Bank of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, North Carolina for the
past three years. Photograph: James Robinson
By 4pm, there were more than 100 cars in the dilapidated parking lot
– once a bustling shopping mall. At the very front were Floyd Liston,
59, and his friend, Bobby Bass, 65. Their story was not atypical.
Bass is retired after years working in a cotton mill. Liston, a
diabetic, worked all his life but had to give up in 2011 after a routine
blister on his foot deteriorated. Married with two daughters, Liston
didn’t have health insurance and did not visit a doctor until it was too
late. “The infection had eaten all the bone. They told me to go to the
hospital and that night they took my leg off,” he said.
In February, in an attempt to address a $2bn debt that it owed the
federal government, North Carolina passed a law that slashed both the
number of weeks for which a job-seeker can receive state benefits and
reduced the amount that it pays out in unemployment, from $535 a week to
$350.
In doing so, North Carolina knowingly violated a contract with the
federal government, resulting in the automatic cutting off of federal
assistance for the long-term unemployed. The changes, which came into
effect in July, therefore didn’t just cut the amount of support that
people who lost their jobs received from their government by a third, it
also meant the maximum length of time they could receive such benefits
plummeted from 99 weeks to just 19.
“What happened in North Carolina was one the harshest cuts in
unemployment benefits we’ve ever seen in this country,” said Mike
Evangelist, a policy director at the National Employment Law Project.
"Nothing I know of compares to it."
The precise impact of the benefits reduction in North Carolina is
difficult to discern, said Larry Katz, a Harvard professor. But he and
other economists have recently been pointing to figures that hint at an
alarming phenomena: people have been dropping out of an already bleak
labor market, and in record numbers.
Since July, when the cuts came into force, North Carolina has
experienced the largest contraction in its labor force since
record-keeping began in 1977. Remarkably, the sharp decline in the
workforce in North Carolina, which has a population of 9.75 million, has
even altered the national picture.
Timothy Littke, 55, from Lumberton, gave up looking for work in North
Carolina in October. He was laid off from his job building hog feeders
in June, a month before the benefits cuts kicked in.
He has since relocated to live with his daughter in Pittsburgh. The
story of Littke’s departure says much about about deprivation in his old
home of Lumberton – a small city in the south of the state which, by
one measure, is the poorest in America.
Fifty years after President Johnson
started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall
percentage of impoverished people in the U.S. has declined only slightly
and the poor have lost ground under President Obama.
Aides said
Mr. Obama doesn’t plan to commemorate the anniversary Wednesday of
Johnson’s speech in 1964, which gave rise to Medicaid, Head Start and a
broad range of other federal anti-poverty programs. The president’s only
public event Tuesday was a plea for Congress
to approve extended benefits for the long-term unemployed, another
reminder of the persistent economic troubles during Mr. Obama’s five
years in office.
“What I think the American people are really looking for in 2014 is just a little bit of stability,” Mr. Obama said.
Although
the president often rails against income inequality in America, his
policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million
Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when he took
office.
The poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for three
consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s.
The poverty rate in 1965 was 17.3 percent; it was 12.5 percent in 2007,
before the Great Recession.
About 50 million Americans live below
the poverty line, which the federal government defined in 2012 as an
annual income of $23,492 for a family of four.
President Obama’s anti-poverty efforts “are basically to give more people more free stuff,” said Robert Rector, a specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“That’s exactly the opposite of what Johnson said,” Mr. Rector said. “Johnson’s goal was to make people prosperous and self-sufficient.”
US President Lyndon B
Johnson hands a pen to civil rights leader Rev Martin Luther King Jr
during the the signing of the voting rights bill as officials look on
behind them on 6 August 1965. Photograph: Washington Bureau/Hulton
Archive
The 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's announcement of "The War on Poverty"
has, of course, brought umpteen assessments of the war's success (and
failure). Officially, we haven't moved the needle much. By the Census
Department's accounting, the US poverty rate has gone down just four
points, from 19 to 15%, and economic inequality has soared. Conservatives argue that the minimal changes in poverty levels just don't justify
all the spending on anti-poverty programs. Progressives ask, isn't 46
million people living in poverty still too many? Shouldn't we do more?
In
the year's since Johnson's idealistic declaration, our focus on
spending, and on raw data, has obscured a more human and qualitative
view of poverty.
Johnson knew that the politics of poverty could
be divisive and that talk of handouts could rub the "pull yourself up by
your bootstraps" believers the wrong way. In 1964, he spoke as strongly
as he could about the way that solutions to poverty could lift the
whole nation. He still faced opposition. Perhaps that's why his 1965
address arguing for passage of the Voting Rights Act also contains an
even more resonant argument for the government's role in lifting the
horizons of the poor. He makes clear the intrinsic connection we've
glossed over: ending poverty is part of the campaign for human rights, not the welfare system.
As Johnson noted:
But
I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these
privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a trained
mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the chance to
find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty.
Today,
politicians of all stripes affect the pose of a regretful accountant
when discussing welfare programs: they say "I feel your pain" on the one
hand, and then turn around and declare "but the numbers don't justify
the spending" on welfare programs. It's a sign of that disturbing
migration of the middle to the far right that some critics don't even bother to put a scrim of compassion over their green eyeshades. Fox News' "Entitlement Nation" segment has boldly scolded children who benefit from free lunch programs.
By Michael Snyder, on February 23rd, 2014
